Do AI Overviews Benefit Search Engines? An Ecosystem Perspective
Abstract
The integration of AI Overviews into search engines enhances user experience but diverts traffic from content creators, potentially discouraging high-quality content creation and causing user attrition that undermines long-term search engine profit. To address this issue, we propose a game-theoretic model of creator competition with costly effort, characterize equilibrium behavior, and design two incentive mechanisms: a citation mechanism that references sources within an AI Overview, and a compensation mechanism that offers monetary rewards to creators. For both cases, we provide structural insights and near-optimal profit-maximizing mechanisms. Evaluations on real click data show that although AI Overviews harm long-term search engine profit, interventions based on our proposed mechanisms can increase long-term profit across a range of realistic scenarios, pointing toward a more sustainable trajectory for AI-enhanced search ecosystems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.22493,
title = {Do AI Overviews Benefit Search Engines? An Ecosystem Perspective},
author = {Yihang Wu and Jiajun Tang and Jinfei Liu and Haifeng Xu and Fan Yao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22493},
year = {2026}
}